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I would like to welcome our first speaker to the stand today a Pioneer in carpeting carbon budgeting a merited professor in energy climate change at the University of Manchester uppsala and Bergen a globally known
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climate influencer who has also made headlines for himself by taking the train all the way from UK to China ladies and gentlemen give a warm Applause for Kevin Anderson thank you
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thank you thanks give us a sec just get the technology working [Music] whoa yeah
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There's Hope for carbon capture and storage yet laughs all right well thank you for that for that introduction um I'm going to I've got to think about
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half an hour I believe something like that so I'm going to try to lay out um a storyline really from the sort of framing we typically see of Net Zero by 2045 for Sweden and indeed for Scotland
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or 2050 for the UK 2070 for India to well actually what do we really need to do for real zero for 1.5 degrees centigrade and very much I'm framing this around carbon budgets so if anyone's heard me speak before nothing
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significantly changed other than another 40 billion tons of carbon Dockside has been put in the atmosphere um the issue of equity and very importantly also the issue of practicality and that's what we mean by
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that is is something we need to think about and discuss um I'm going to start off with a health warning and I'm I've got this on here really probably less necessary in this audience but I do quite a few talks in the UK for government departments I
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always tend to put this in those of you might have seen The Matrix this is this is from The Matrix so this is this is a red pill um presentation so I don't like my conclusions but you know they are the
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conclusions um I'm not over or underplayed them um the language may appear provocative I've probably toned it down for Swedish audience um but it reflects the analysis and I
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think that's what we need to do I know our language should reflect the analysis um it's uncomfortable and again think about this in the UK government audience really it's uncomfortable within the Cozy climate tales that we've been
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telling ourselves for 30 years and that we've normalized um so I hope you at least again hopefully in this audience that's the case anyway you're happy to taste the red pill um but if you disagree in the end with
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this then obviously we've got questions and discussions and we've got our discussion as well at the end where we have some we have some disagreements that but I think mostly agreements we'll see um so start off flippantly perhaps with
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it sorry too far away okay okay great okay fine I'll try not to burst into song um for your sakes
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so I'll start off with a bit of Science in a sort of flipping way these are these are what we've tried for 30 years on the science good intentions Machiavellian policies eloquent arguments legal licenses lots of
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accountancy scams and in that include Net Zero um but actually the care the physics doesn't care about any of that and I think that's we have to remind ourselves of that when we talk about the real world or what's practical well it
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doesn't care about these niceties it only really cares about the amount of total amount of carbon dioxide another greenhouse gases that we put in the atmosphere so that's the sciencey bit over um so where to start so I'm going to
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start with the the Paris agreement um just you know just a bit slow switching isn't it because it's switching via zooms it takes a little while to start with the Paris agreement and what I want to start off with is um
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a few years ago the focus was really all on two degrees Centigrade of warming but now I think there's been a shift much more towards 1.5 degrees Centigrade which is at the same time has happened that our emissions keep going up in the atmosphere so we've got a tighter Target
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and a smaller budget um but uh and there are ways that that's been fiddled if you like so we've moved from one two degree centigrade to the same for 1.5 and there are some very good reasons for that
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after the Paris agreement and it's odd again it's the the analysis came after the conclusions if you like so the Paris agreement says let's have 1.5 and then people said well what does that mean and then we said the analysis afterwards but
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so the um the ipcc was to look at this and produce their report in 2018 the SR Special Report 1.5 and broadly in that it points out that the impacts for 1.5 um are pretty destructive across
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ecosystems human systems and so forth so 1.5 is not a safe threshold um but the impacts of two degrees Centigrade are considerably worse and there's certainly there's quite viable valid science and people like Hansen and
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many others who would argue even at 1.5 we pass many uh really important non-linearities tipping points so some some scientists suggest that even that is too dangerous a threshold and others think we will have a little bit more
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time for that sort of temperature maybe a little higher but let's also remind ourselves that that our Focus isn't on temperature we're not really interested in temperature what we're really interested in is the rate of change of impacts
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so if the impacts that we're seeing from climate change occurred over a million years so what if they came over 500 years becomes a bit more important if they curve over 20 years it becomes incredibly important so it's the time frame over which the impact's occurring that's really
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important and this this language of temperature is just a proxy for the change in impacts can our human systems can ecosystems deal with the change that we're actually seeing and witnessing and so far on our human systems in many
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parts of the world are struggling with the existing climate that we have and the the the the norm that we have today which will change again next year and the year after but so of course our many ecosystems and we can see that with some of the ecological destruction not just
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related to climate change but broader sort of human activities uh hopefully some of you have seen these diagrams before these are quite commonly used the burning Ember diagrams they're called and it's another one that's sort of managerial tools that the ipcc use so
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what we have here is sets of impacts at a global level and they they are taken from really lots and lots of academic work so there's lots of research behind all of this and they've tried to simplify it into a set of sort of bars
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for different types of impacts at a global level um and then sort of use a color to say how bad they are and not unusually red is bad um but what's interesting is that these
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have been updated every few years and what you see is how that the what was initially thought to be bad at a certain temperature at that temperature normally gets to be lower and you've got the latest set and you see the impacts look
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much worse and that's one that we have learned from the science is the impacts are much worse at lower temperatures than we thought so we thought they would occur at high temperatures now at lower temperatures and this is one of the strong reasons why we've moved from this
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sort of does it work on here no it doesn't from the two degree Centigrade framing to 1.5 and let's also be clear again that 1.5 is not safe and the 1.5 informed cop 26 so this idea
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of this language rhetorical political rhetoric really but keep 1.5 alive um and that's I think that has also become a much more of a
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um of a framework for thinking about some of the issues on mitigation as well so I think there is some genuine concern behind trying to stay at 1.5 because there are good reasons not to go above it um even though the chances of not going
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above it look incredibly Slim and I think this is something that said to me quite a lot at the uh cop in um in Glasgow by other colleagues from other people from elsewhere outside the global
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North typically climate change is not a threat it's a reality and and the opening day of cop here's a couple of quotes there were lots of quotes given on the opening day of the cop and they reported by What's called the UN news United Nations news they stopped
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counting the uh the death when the death toll reached six thousand but there are 1600 bodies still missing massive floods devastating wildfires and Rising Seas along with countless lives they take and their livelihoods they upend our
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realities many nations are already facing and if you looked at somewhere like Pakistan recently you look at what happened there now admitted that was certainly a very strong climate change signal in that but also the way the flooding was actually organizing the
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country was also very much a political decision so again these things play on top of each other um and but they're sort of if you if you like people would be sometimes to say well that's just anecdote what does the science tell us well I mean it's usually
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fairly conservative organization the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change so this is taken from working group two um and and the notes the word have here that have bouldered so this is at 1.1 degree Centigrade of warming increasing
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weather and climate extremes have exposed millions of people to um acute food insecurity reduce water security and so forth and look at the countries that's mostly impacting so far typically Global South countries typically poorer
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people people typically people who had nothing to do or very little to do with the predicament we Face ourselves find ourselves in today losses of food production access to food compounded by decreased diet diversity have increased
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malnutrition um again typically for communities outside those that have caused most of the problem and in all regions extreme or was it um heat vents have resulted in increased mortality and morbidity so
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more suffering and more deaths so the climate change we are deliberately knowingly producing today when we drive or fly or heat our homes it is having these impacts today we are killing people today with the activities we choose to pursue
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um so in in the work that with that we've done with a number of colleagues here uh izak Jesse and now it's Sophie as well so if you've got any difficult questions you can ask them later um we've tended to take a review that
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for well below two degrees Centigrade we're looking for what we use in the ipcc this language of an 83 chance of staying below two and the carbon budget for that I think you're probably all familiar with carbon budgets here hopefully
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um it's about the same actually as a as an outside chance of 1.5 degrees Centigrade so the probabilities matter if we can keep it that relevant carbon budget there's a very good chance of staying below two and there's an outside
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chance we might not go above above 1.5 um and the the weakest interpretation or sorry the most strenuous interpretation is that we want to aim for a 50 50 chance of 1.5 and that gives us a much
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smaller carbon budget as I'll come back to in just a minute so what's the ice what does the science tell us what's the ipcc tell us about this yeah sorry taking a bit longer to pass them my screen here is faster than this one there
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that's okay um so you get lots of tables like this that are in the ipcc um and don't worry about the numbers too much but what it gives you is if you want a temperature rise 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial periods
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then it from from 2020 it tells us for these numbers here how much carbon dioxide there or thereabouts we can put in the atmosphere so if you want a 50 50 chance of staying below 1.5 you can put 500 billion tons in the atmosphere in the start of 2020. if you're if you're
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happy with two degrees centigrade and I would have a guess that people in the global South certainly are not then you've got 900 billion tons for well below two degrees and as I said before the budget for that is the same as an outside chance a small chance of 1.5
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so that's our budget range if you like but let's also be clear that these um these budgets don't include quite quite a large set of feedbacks for a whole set of very good reasons
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um these Earth system feedback so some are included but some are not and most of them are not and they're not included because they're not sufficiently well understood to actually include in the analysis in the budgets but it is worth us as policy
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makers as people in companies at Civil Society to be aware that they're there because they have a big risk factor associated with them um and the ipcc do give a value for the Earth system feedbacks that are not
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included in the budgets and um in our view then if you that you should be at least aware that um that these feedbacks are there and that they are they could very likely they could decrease the
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amount of carbon budget that we have they could impossibly increase it but I think at the lower temperatures that's very unlikely and the the amount they reduce it by is quite significant um so you're talking about you know 40
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reduction in the 50 50 chance for 1.5 and um a little bit less for the uh for the two degree centigrade and so it cuts the time frame that we have to actually deliver on these carbon budgets significantly and I personally think
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policymakers should be aware of that rather than just having it sort of hidden and not hidden but you know you've got to read the detail of the report to find these things I think the policy makers need to be aware that we are already being optimistic in the
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budgets that we actually have so the budgets that we're using here today I would say are the absolute maximum you could you should really be aiming for ideally something significant less so let's take the headline budgets and let's adjust them to today November
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2022. so these are the the two probabilities that we're using um that's the budget that we have left for two degrees Centigrade that's the budget we've got for 1.5 and these are the years you have
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so you know 1.5 nine and a half years of current emissions if the current emissions stayed static we'd have nine and a half years oh a bit worrying um that's about half a percent a bit
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under half a percent every month for two degrees centigrade and one percent so every month we're using one percent of the 50 50 chance of 1.5 degrees Centigrade which is not anyway a safe
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threshold every month one percent of the budget I think that's really quite a damning so that's things since the start of this year we've used ten ten and a half percent of the budget is gone just since the start of this year and yet when we actually what do we hear we hear
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Sweden talking about 2045. we hear the UK's about 2050 and it's remember it's not zero in 2045. it's just 85 reduction of the things we're prepared to count by 2045. you know
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India 2017. this this relative to 1.5 and 2 degrees Centigrade this is just nonsense and yet it dominates the discussions within our countries within negotiations it's so far removed from what the basic
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arithmetic of the science tells us and if you plotted out those Pathways a power pathway for those temperatures these are the sorts of plots that they would look like and there's not a lot of flexibility in this you can't you can't make the curve move further away so this
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is a very good chance for well would you call it a very good chance a 67 chance of 1.5 degrees Centigrade 50 50 chance and um the lower chance which is the same budget there as the uh as the two
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degree centigrade and so the budgets get bigger you get more scope for this but this is remember this is at a global level um and of course in Paris we're also committed to do all of this on the basis of equity so we very much bought into
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this and this goes right back to the UNF Triple C United Nations framework convention in 1992 that was ratified in 94. so um you know this concept of equity has been embedded in every single negotiation ever since then and that's
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this this is despite quite a lot of the wealthy World almost all of the wealthy World deliberately trying to undermine that Equity component year on year but it's still very clearly in there um
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so following the language in the Paris agreement on Equity they use these terms developing country parties and developed country parties they wouldn't I don't particularly like either term um particularly come from the UK because I think we're not really very developed
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anymore now about Sweden's heading that way as well um so these are the two sort of categories that they use um and although we that's the work that I'm
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going to be talking about here and that feeds into some of the other papers that we've been involved with uh Jesse Isaac Sophia myself we are actually trying to refine this now um with a with a new paper that we're working on so we're not using those categories we're trying to do it Nation
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by Nation um and that's some work I say that's ongoing at the moment but sticking with the Paris agreement framing what we have to do is divide the carbon Pi between the developed and the developing countries
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um and we're we're a number of ways of doing this it's quite a long process but basically there are a couple of criteria in there that the developing countries the the mitigation rates for those should always be less in the near term
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than the rates reductions with or the rates of change we've seen in the developed countries and it's the same in the longer term that the mitigation rates the developing countries should never be in excess of what we expect to see from the developed countries so I
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probably most people would say these quite reasonable criteria but once you put those criteria on there there's actually not again a lot of flexibility yeah what when you've got tight budgets and some basic criteria the flexibility
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you have quickly disappears which is why things like negative emissions are used to try and bring back that flexibility so the curves look a little bit like this this is the developed uh um country in developing developing countries in
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Orange and developed countries in in blue um and just look at the date this is for 50 50 chance of 1.5 it looks talking about zero fossil fuels effectively here by some time a decade from now there or thereabouts I
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think we mustn't play overplay the Precision there's a lot of uncertainties in in every element of the climate science right the way through to all the other work around that but still it gives us a pretty good guide you know
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whether it's 2031 or 2030 or 2032 that sort of time frame um but remember that blue line that looks more challenging only 20 less than 20 of the world's population live under that line and 80 percent live under the
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other line so although it looks like the poorer parts of the world are getting a slightly easier deal that's not actually true um I say we can you draw different lines not very there's not a lot of flexibility with the 1.5 budget I think
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there's very little flexibility at all with a 2dbc budget you've got a bit more flexibility I would argue and I think some of my colleagues would argue that probably if you had that flexibility that maybe that should be given to the to the economies that are certainly in
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transition rather than the ones already very wealthy so maybe not to the least um the poorest countries because they haven't got a fossil fuel infrastructure so they could hopefully LeapFrog that but for the ones in transition the Chinese the Indians and so forth then I
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think possibly there's a good argument that's where the budget should go um what's important here to remember is that Equity without um practicality is not equity you can have an equitable framework a
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fair framework but if you can't deliver it it's not fair so you've got to then try and finesse these these things and and this is difficult particularly talking to some of the poor parts of the world who quite
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rightly want Equity to be a central part of the analysis um so in our work what we've actually made out is that with those curves before is that already the cumulative emissions per person for the wealthy
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countries remains higher than that for the poorer countries so there's an element of inequity in that and we would argue this actually is too late from a purely mitigation point of view to um in terms of reduction using our
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emissions to actually embed Equity it's we can't do that anymore we should have started earlier we didn't we chose not to it wasn't wasn't forced upon us we chose not to do it earlier and so what we would say now is that what we need to be doing is the least
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unjust apportionment division of the budget but that needs to be accompanied with really major Financial transfers um and you know well beyond loss and damages but also technology transfers
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but also recognize there are lots of things that we can learn from the global South about how to do things much better than we do in the global North but certainly from a financial and Technical point of view I think the transfers need to be headed in that direction and I don't mean this 100 billion pounds per
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100 billion dollars per year I mean that's just peanuts that we argue over we're talking I think we're probably talking trillions per year but not you know it's not the small numbers particularly if we want the some of the parts of the world to Leap Forward over the fossil fuel era
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so let's now look solely at the carbon budgets for the wealthy parts of the world and let's try and see how we can um apportion those out so we're just looking at the developed countries which is a much smaller group um so that that is a focus here so the
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arguments we make for the developed countries you could not would not want to make for all countries in the world now say we're working on that separately for now but there we certainly there are big concerns about applying these sorts of methods so if you use equal per
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capita you could use based on your capacity how wealthy is your economy how carbon intenses your um is your uh is your economy how much CO2 per per dollar or per krona um how how energy intent how carbon
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intenses your energy system is it like a coal or is it a lot of wind or solar or Hydro or whatever um human development indices or well-being in see indices of one sort another historical emissions or grandfathering um and now um
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these all got multiple benefits and drawbacks so there's no wonderful system out there but as I say the practicality has to be factored in in the absence of practicality I would argue it's not particularly helpful so equal per capita
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well that's unworkable for some Nations because we are we've left this so late even in developing countries where evil vocabulary will start to play out really problematically um it can inform the decisions again but I think it's it's a real challenge based
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on capacity um you know that ignores that's how wealthy countries are in those big differences in the carbon intensity levels of the economies and of their energy systems uh the the one that just
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focuses on the GDP uh on the um carbon intensity of the of the economy ignores the factors they've got really rich countries and really poor countries within that if you just focus on the energy system that ignores um
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other factors to do with your how big your economy is can you afford to make that transition much faster than others the human development indices aren't really relevant we would argue probably within the um developed countries because it's
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quite a small group of relatively wealthy countries relatively wealthy um up to very wealthy but it's good maybe one thing you could look at at a global level historical emissions they miss out a whole set of factors but again need to inform our thinking and
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then this grandfathering which is the one that we adopt um why do we choose grandfathering uh partly because it captures the virtues of all of some of the other methods partially captures them it only
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partially captures these things it embeds elements of carbon intensity um and the intensity of the carbon density of the economy both Energy System and the economy um it makes some allowance for existing
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infrastructure both demand and supply and remember that the demand is we always think about the power stations but the demand part is really important as well what infrastructure have we got that that works because we've got fossil fuels on the demand side so that's
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important it it embeds some elements of cultural lock-in um and it embeds some idea of some sense of the capacity to transition to a decarbonized society from you know depending how wealthy your Society is so all these things are captured to one
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degree or another it embeds I think Simplicity and practicality at least practicality within the constraints of a very very tight budget but let's be clear grandfathering is is far from perfect it's not fair
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um all we're arguing is a simple approach it's probably the best that we have and if you're prepared to refine it a little bit further which is what we're trying to do now at a wider Global level then there are probably other things you can do but the more you add to it the
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more complex it is and the harder it becomes to explain um and as time goes on past Paris grandfathering becomes less and less appropriate because we should really start in Paris and if you know some countries might have started then or
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might start now if others start in five years time that's a bit unfair on the ones that have made the effort so far so grandfathering is only valid really near the period when we sort of agree that all countries should be starting to do something and of course many countries
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are not so let's play all this out and let's um I think what this might might look like for uh for Sweden East Sweden showing leadership that's what we always hear is that the Sweden Australian leader at least we did here
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until quite recently maybe we're still hearing it now I don't know um you know Sweden's emissions are down quite considerably from from their 1990 levels but we hear the same thing in the UK I mean what's interesting if you've got the cops you know every country in
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the world is leading on climate change the emissions are still going up which is a little strange either the physics is lying or some of the leaders are lying one or the other um and so and if we take account of Aviation and shipping imports and
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exports then you get a very different story so for Sweden somewhere it's five to ten percent down from what it was in 1990 um and that but that's similar for the UK for Denmark I think Denmark's not
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come down at all actually France so there are no climate Progressive countries out there when you factor in aviation shipping and imports and exports there are no climate Progressive countries in the world so that's I think that's quite a worrying certainly
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amongst the wealthy countries probably not amongst the others maybe some people would argue Costa Rica and so forth but So within the developed country budget how much should Sweden get of that what's the proportion Sweden should get well carrying out the method that um
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Isaac and I did in a paper using the paper um in 2020 then if you want a good chance of two degrees Centigrade you can see the budgets here 355 million tons Sweden's emissions are I mean cleanly Innovation shipping are probably about
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50 million tons territorially and so you can sort of see the the you know how fast you'd have to reduce them by if you just do that now what's interesting there look at the ones in Brackets the the numbers without the bracket so
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if you started in January 2022 the numbers in Brackets if you started January 2023 so look how much difference one year makes particularly under the 1.5 budget it's
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just enormous you realize how rapidly each year we choose to fail how much that changes the following year and I think that's a really key message here that because we've left it so late every day of failure makes makes
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tomorrow much much harder whichever way you look at this whether it's 1.5 or 2 degrees Centigrade whether it's Sweden the UK the US Australia Japan whatever this is profound
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an immediate change in our system in so many respects in way above what governments are ever prepared to talk about and I say I don't particularly like these conclusions but that's what's what comes out of the arithmetic now why is this so different to what we hear from
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our governments um and this I think it's this this language of Net Zero is just hugely a while to come through again sorry it's usually important here so this is a phrase that you hopefully you're all
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quite familiar with if you're in the UK we hear it everywhere no one whether it's academics or news readers or everyone they talk about Net Zero you say what do you mean by that and almost no one knows what they mean by it they're just using the language because
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it's become common so the ipcc didn't use this at all the ar5 in the way that we think about it now in terms of our whole economy they only use it relates to passive houses but in fact we're looking at an AR6 then it's used about a
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thousand times and then and it's all to do with um this sort of negative emissions and really passing the burden on to Future Generations um the committee on climate change in the UK that in many respects coined this
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and their fifth budget report in 2015 it wasn't using once used once in their 20 2020 report it was used between three thousand five thousand times it's you know it's just we just use it now with the stock without stopping to think and the academics do that I think it's a
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disgrace because if academics aren't prepared to think they should attack themselves and go get a different job so our job is to think so we should not be using language in that sort of loose fashion that we are fine to use it if you've really thought it through but what does it do it embeds
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substitution and as soon as you see substitution you know that there'll be unscrupulous policy makers thinking aha we can get out get out of jail card free here so it allows you to swap between the greenhouse gases between carbon dioxide
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and methane or nitrous oxide it allows you to swap sources you can swap carbon dioxide from Cars to fertilizer from um nitrous oxide from fertilizer it allows you to cross cost decades so you can have a flight today that's okay because
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we're planting some trees in North of Sweden in 2030 that'll absorb the carbon dioxide so it assumes that a ton is a ton is a ton which is great from an accountancy point of view on a spreadsheet but in reality they've got different chemistries they're different
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atmospheric lifetimes and big difference levels of certainty and risk between these things so I keep forgetting it's being delayed the other thing it does it embeds in huge quantities of carbon dioxide removal there are no scenarios out there
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the high level scenarios that do not assume this and by this I mean we're expecting future Generations well our own children and future generations to absorb huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere either through technologies that barely exist today
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just a small pilot schemes or in some academics imagination um on so-called nature-based Solutions as well dismissed and probably doing it on Zoom all your
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live comments come through um and the scale of this must not be underestimated remember this isn't every single major model we're talking about hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide removal are assumed in the
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future when we're all retired or dead you know hundreds of billions of tons so roughly the same size of the current Global oil and gas industry so it's an industry that doesn't exist that every scenario assumes will look as big as the oil and gas industry today it's that sort of scale and so they
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don't exist today at any scale yes I think I won't go through this one length but yes I think we should research these things and possibly deploy them if they meet very stringent uh ecological and social sustainability criteria but let's reduce our emissions assuming they won't
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work and anyway agricultural emissions we will not get down to Zero from my understanding we cannot eliminate all agricultural emissions even if the whole world went vegan and we had no-till plowing a field so it didn't plow our Fields then you still have a lot of
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emissions particularly I think increasingly from from nitrous oxide as we have to put more fertilizer on to get better yields to feed more people and particularly the changing climate so energy has to be real zero there's no neat way out of that but all the
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scenarios assume lots more energy use fossil fuel energy use rather um way into 2050 and Beyond it's also seen to be a policy this is the strongest argument a lot of people make there's a political argument that
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it's a its strength is it's a policy framework for all um but for me actually that vagueness undermines it's its real purpose and allows us to expand the use of fossil fuels hence every scenario out there includes large amounts of fossil fuels
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even in 2050. Net Zero 24 1.5 scenarios all clued large amounts of fossil fuels the International Energy agency scenario includes 25 of the energy still being fossil fuels in 2050 I mean there's no
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way that can be reconciled with what the science tells us unless you rely on negative emissions but all of this lot of virtuous organizations all of these have Net Zero 2050 targets none of those are intended to stop producing gas and
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oil in 2050. it's only scope one and two if you read their reports scope three burning the stuff is not included but presumably that's the purpose of exploiting of getting out of the ground is to burn it and this I'm just going to
00:31:08
store it somewhere for fun all of these countries are looking right now looking for more oil and gas and yet we know from the research we can't burn half the oiling gas we want if you want for one point a good chance of 1.5 you can burn about a third of
00:31:21
what we have so Net Zero is first it's not it's not zero fossil fuels nothing like it there's this whole framing that allows us to expand the carbon budget so we can all feel slightly happier in our homes
00:31:34
today because we haven't got to make these big changes it disguides as sort of a green wasp business as usual that's what we've been doing for for decades now has been in line with our Paris and other Equity commitments
00:31:45
um and Isaac and I uh with another colleague we did a little bit of work trying to look at what would the Swedish policy or the UK policy indeed look like if it was carried out globally and it would look at something like two and a half degrees Centigrade of warming if
00:31:58
not more so to conclude the headline choice for developed countries more widely not just for Sweden is that um if you're if you want to ignore International equity which is what we've done so far we want
00:32:11
to pass a huge burden of climate change onto our children two and a half three degrees Centigrade future if not higher than that we're naive on our International agreement agreements then that does dovetail nicely well particularly in Sweden the UK at the
00:32:23
moment Dove sells very nicely with our current politics which is do very little about climate change it maintains the the market economic model so we can privatize lots more things um and as long as you get some sort of mitigation about five percent per annum
00:32:36
at most probably that we get out of this and Net Zero by 2045 and that all fits together and we just have to hope that our children will forgive us for deliberately scamming the whole system but if we're serious about this then we
00:32:48
need International Equity to be a key driver in our policies we need a huge effort by this generation and that's why we don't like it by this generation um we need to cut emissions in line with 1.5 um at the outside too and that means you
00:33:01
have to meet our Paris commitments but that is a complete change in our structures of our society we need a massive ramp up in government leadership here reshaping of mainstream economics and I would argue that's happened to some degree we're not in a
00:33:14
positive way since the banking crisis and then since covid so I think mainstream economics is in the air at the moment but it's not coming down in any way that seems to be particularly sustainable and we need Equity at its core but you're then talking about 15 to 25 cuts and Emissions a year on year for
00:33:27
developed countries which sounds impossible um but if we started earlier it would have been much simpler to do um but the equity part I think gives us real scope there because within our countries there are huge differences in
00:33:40
in our emissions um if we wanted to live on Paris we're going to need to reconsider what does growth mean what's progress what is development we have to ask these sorts of questions about our society and we don't have a long time to answer them
00:33:52
anymore but hopefully that's we've been thinking about it for a while we need to reframe issues of value and how we reward success we typically reward success like if you're a lecturer in the University you become a professor you get a large pay pay increase which means basically you have a higher carbon
00:34:04
footprint so the moment we reward success by giving people more carbon emissions when you have an alternative relationship with time we pretty much ignore the past and we pretty much ignore the future so there's there seems to be some sort of rapidly sort of
00:34:17
condensing time towards just just the immediate period that's not true for everyone but there's an element of that in our in our systems that we have particularly our economic systems we need to think about intra and intergenerational Equity so other parts of the world are suffering the impacts
00:34:29
of that even because our children will suffer the impacts indeed some of us are now as well and we have to have a much much deeper appreciation and this comes from ongoing discussions with these act I wasn't sure how to rephrase this years ago but the more than the human world of
00:34:42
which of course we are a small part and by no means I think an essential part um this is taken from the ipcc again that sort of relatively conservative conservative organization and I don't think we could say any better
00:34:55
um targeting a climate resilient sustainable World involves fundamental changes to how Society functions including changes to our underlying values Our World Views ideologies social structures political economic systems
00:35:07
and power relationships I mean it's in other words throw it all up in the air and start again and that's in the ipcc which I'm amazed that ever got past the the lawyers um because it's very carefully checked when these things are published but
00:35:21
anyway that quote is in there from working group too and I think that captures the essence of the source the changes we're talking about so on that note thanks for listening foreign thank you Kevin for that presentation
00:35:40
um very interesting to hear and we will hear more about it during the day and now it's been time for Thomas Han to come up Thomas Han is a associate professor of ecological economics at Stockholm resilience Center you were
00:35:53
asked to come here and to comment on Kevin's work yeah and then there's a public discussion and then I have a seminar with I have a seminar with Kevin after this
00:36:05
in half an hour in 25 minutes but now supposed to just have can you just click on the side four or five slides here comments yeah um
00:36:19
I'm in a college Economist from um I work in Stockholm resilience center now here if you look at the global emissions um around 40 billion tons
00:36:38
and you want to have the five 1.5 degrees with 67 probability and the action is starting in 2022 that means it's six percent or 5.88 per year if we accept an
00:36:51
um linear reduction so this is what we have to do a global level so this is the challenge at the global level [Music] and if nothing is done
00:37:11
until 25 2025 and then of course we need a much faster reduction uh nine percent per year this is when we express things in a linear reduction and
00:37:24
Kevin was just talking about other um percentages because he's using exponential reduction and mathematically that means the double um
00:37:36
or almost double depending on on when you reach 0 because you never reach there when you have asymptotic curve here and and uh the exponential reduction assumes the very first Traction in the
00:37:52
first year then you have the same 10 from the previous year so it's smaller reduction in Toms every year and this is the the common way to
00:38:04
express this mathematically how how the rate of change mathematically exponential growth and here's exponential um reduction um often we talk about linear reduction instead
00:38:18
so then five percent linear is the same thing as ten percent exponential if we have the same carbon budget and we're doing the same carbon budget in these things so here's the 400. 400 gigaton carbon dioxide is carbon
00:38:31
budget so here is linear reduction so it's important to understand that when you talk about the percentage annual reduction we must be clear about is it linear or is it exponential
00:38:44
and the European Union in the mission training system that talked about the linear reduction Factor it was 1.74 every year and then the European Parliament I think was last year or
00:38:58
something change that to 2.2 percent every year and that is a linear reduction this is called LL ref the linear reduction Factor so that's a common way to express it as
00:39:10
Innovative people understand it and I don't think we've understand it when it's a 21 reduction it sounds like it's going to go to CR in five years but it's not it's it's so I think I think that's the way how we explain
00:39:23
things and I I talked to many many people many researchers and there seemed to be an agreement that the linear thing is more pedagogic it's more how people think but the the red line is more scientific
00:39:36
that's how many physicists and economists Express rate of change and what I'm doing in my research is to calculate um equal per capita and it's very common as Kevin showed is
00:39:52
one of the most common ways to to allocate among countries but then we go back to 1990 uh because we think that our grandfathering is not a fair principle
00:40:05
um in ecological economics and or environmental economics grandfathering is typically seen as the most unfair distribution and the reason why we do it also in a mission training system the first five
00:40:19
years I started with grandfathering because it's feasible as you start from where you are so it's realistic in a way and then you approach Industries or countries where they are so all the road maps start from
00:40:31
grandfathering because you start from where you are it doesn't mean that it's fair that some counters have very very high emissions per capita is it fair the United States had three times higher than Sweden per capita
00:40:43
and therefore they should have three times more allocation than Sweden well we can argue that so generally it's not fair but it's it might be feasible and the common budget differentiate
00:40:56
responsibility increases perspective capabilities principle there is no unique scientific answer to this it's an ethical issue that is worth a sincere public discussion and political
00:41:08
negotiation so we cannot really answer this in scientific way so here I just assume that uh we were chosen this historically called per capita and the cabin is talking about the grandfathering and that's not
00:41:22
correct and wrong answer so this different ethical positions and the trade-offs between this so we are trying to to account for historical emissions um by going back to 1990 and the first
00:41:38
year of um well it was just before ipcc started and unfcc started in 92 but this was the first reports coming out that Global change climate change was
00:41:50
accepted at an international politics we had also liabilities for all the rich countries High income countries to make up for mitigation failure so if you fail to meet your
00:42:02
territorial reduction of emissions and then it has sometimes compensate that um so that's both the liabilities to invest in negative emissions and liabilities to
00:42:16
to invest in developing countries to invest in solar and wind power in other ways to have a clean development
00:42:27
and I do I do a totally agree with with Kevin that you should keep this apart you should have a copper budget that is only for fossil carbon for many reasons because we should not
00:42:40
include Net series not include this negative stuff in the carbon because a very confusing to see what is actually reducing here and what is compensation and also tree Plantation you only
00:42:54
generally fix carbon dioxide in the trees that's part of the biosphere and what's in the trees will be will be back in the atmosphere after 50 100 years if you store back in the lithosphere
00:43:06
then it's real going back to where you take it from because fossil fuels take it from the lithosphere and it's the only way you can put the back is carbon removal when you go back to the lithosphere so this um you mentioned Uh
00:43:19
Kevin uh nature-based Solutions I think that nature-based Solutions are good but it's not real it's not real coming back to the lithosphere because we're just planting trees and that's not the real compensation
00:43:32
so we should keep this apart so that's why we are doing this calculations for only fossil fuels and then when we see how some counters have really very difficult to make this Equity then we'll
00:43:45
go back to feasibility how can this be sorted out so what can help do different countries need what help does Saudi Arabian needs because it's very difficult for them what helped us Australia Canada United States of
00:43:57
America and Russia those are the high meeting countries look up it and they're real problems to get up with this with this equal per capita principle so then we can discuss what help they need and how they can
00:44:10
compensate because some of these companies are very rich they are very high GDP per capita so they might be liable to do a lot of these things to finance really negative missions or to finance investment in solar and wind in
00:44:23
developing countries so we do this visibility in the second part so we first start with the with the what we think is fair uh just and then we discuss okay this is
00:44:35
difficult for some countries how do we solve that okay okay that's the start of the discussion yes yes these things and how what we have done in in our seminar afterwards yes
00:44:52
program we have uh around 15 minutes for discussion and questions on this uh the debate between Kevin and Thomas will continue uh I will let Kevin just quickly give a short reply if you want
00:45:04
now or do you want to save it for after the break yeah let's open up questions so uh if you're with us on Zoom uh you're happy to raise your hand and uh
00:45:16
and have a question for us I will try to put you up here on the screen and the people here in the audience is welcome to participate as well and you just raise your hand basically do we have any questions in the audience to start up
00:45:29
with yes one up there uh and you will just tell me the question I'll have to recite it for the audience here [Music] so it was a question to Thomas about
00:46:05
nature-based Solutions and his critique sort of yeah are there any nature-based solutions that could actually compensate in general because it's a part of
00:46:19
thinking and ecosystem services and and having um co-benefits and so on but it should not be mixed with fossil fuels so in this case I agree with Kevin that we
00:46:31
should not because planting trees and store and Forest is one of the complementary measures that obscures the the clarity so when
00:46:43
you mix those things with fossil fuels then you mix the the long cycle with the lithosphere millions of years of fossil fuels with a short cycle and a fast cycle in the biosphere so therefore that there should be two different currencies
00:46:55
then you need to have two different policies so policies for for more carbon storage in the soil on agricultural soil and in forest and then leave it in the ground for the fossil fuels so so that
00:47:09
the argument was just having two different currencies so I think we totally agree on that we don't mix these things so what do you think we agree to a part to a certain level there um so your point on soils is really
00:47:20
important that we just assume when you plant a tree the tree is it grows absorbs carbon but it also has an effect on the soil and a lot of carbon is in the soil and if you plant trees in the in the in in appropriate places you can actually
00:47:32
mobilize the carbon that's in the soil so if you want the best thing from a carbon point of view is to restore existing forests low quality forests to make them better quality forests the next thing is to look at areas that recently been deforested and you can
00:47:46
replant those but if you go to some of the pasture lands and so forth which in the models are often also forested then you can cause a lot of problems from emissions from the soil but where I think we may disagree I don't care about the accounting from that I don't think
00:47:58
we should be accounting for it forests and trees should be part of an are thinking about about the Ecology of our planet and I probably wouldn't we maybe just the language here I wouldn't use ecosystem Services just so I always have this sort of simple phrase you know
00:48:10
plant trees for good to tree reasons do not plant them for some bean counter to use in their spreadsheet to do with carbon so I don't really care about the carbon from the trees I care about this or ecological benefit effects which are
00:48:22
not easy things to measure from the forests uh yes can I just have one from Zoom before is there anyone on Zoom who has raised
00:48:34
their hands to have a question and I will have our technician flag if anyone wants to no nothing on Zoom okay and we'll continue
00:48:47
in the room no no it's okay because we have the big camera up there and we hear you fine for the mic yeah we are talking about the CO2 not yet
00:49:01
and I hear often and the CO2 is often combined with all the um the good things we think about in our life
00:49:14
we can eat meat we can travel we can that's to to to cut that will be a very um
00:49:27
opinion against that so the idea is why don't we go to the other greenhouse gases which are more aggressive like methane like nitrogen
00:49:41
methan could be perhaps much easier captured and closed and yeah it was so the question yeah everyone assume
00:49:55
heard that I'll leave the mic to you um yeah that's a really important point and I think these you need there's a lot in that so trying to keep it as quick as possible the carbon budgets we have already make very optimistic assumptions
00:50:08
on the other greenhouse gases so the budgets we're using here the top that we're both using from the ipcc assumed significant reductions in methane and methane atmospheric concentrations now what we know at the moment is the
00:50:21
concentration of methane is going up very rapidly in the atmosphere we don't know why there are three reasons for that we think one is to do with from fossil fuel production methane leak from that another one is the the chemical in the atmosphere that cleans out the
00:50:34
methane may not be quite so effective for various reasons which means the methane might last a bit longer and the third one is because the planet is warmer remember if it's warmer by a degree then in some parts of the world on land it'll be two and two and a half degrees warmer then the actual activity
00:50:46
of biogenic activity could be releasing more methane almost certainly will be we can't control that so already I think we've been overly optimistic about methane anyway so the carbon budgets we have here are I would say the you know
00:50:59
we should not be going anywhere anywhere higher than those they are the absolutely you know the maximum we should be we should be delivering to because they always take already take account of these these wider issues a question that came in through this
00:51:14
is the budget is so tiny and we will soon run out how can we keep engaged and active using the concept of CO2 budgets in your opinion because with the budget we get a natural
00:51:30
science basis for understanding how we test the room for for for improvement for this the The Urge the urge the urge comes very clear on her budget
00:51:42
so I think that's even more important when running out to understand that there are no nice neat ways that we're missing here I mean whatever whatever method you use if you want to stick within certain temperatures remember
00:51:56
those temperatures are about impacts and those impacts are about real people dying from climate change and suffering from climate change along with other ecosystems you know we're just using the budgets as a way to think about trying
00:52:08
to stop that level of impact now you know there are other ways we can look at this but whatever way you do it it's going to be massive changes to our society yeah we should have done this earlier we didn't we're in this position because
00:52:21
we've lied for 30 years that's that's what comes and not telling the truth but we have to face it now yeah one question over here just pass the mic thank you uh more on the detail or have
00:52:37
you argued about linear and exponential curves I thought it was interesting uh so I as I understood you you argued that it is more intuitive to a society I guess to understand the impacts of a
00:52:50
linear curve so you said that VR device would assume for instance that we need to cut all emissions in five years that would be the intuitive way of understanding what's suggested in an exponential curve and then my question
00:53:02
would be isn't it more important we have our budget and this is about how we how we how we suggest that we are supposed to use it in the future not influencing the budget itself isn't it
00:53:15
more important to find us um to suggest a reduction method that is realistic rather than the what is optimal pedagogically so either we have
00:53:27
this exponential curve might argue is more realistic but maybe not so intuitive which is the important perspective here what is the
00:53:39
important perspective here when I I looked at some countries and disease the national determined contributions that all the counters are supposed to deliver to unfccc and they
00:53:55
look more or less like a linear facing out curve so when you are doing road maps popular for countries or for organizations companies unless you have one very major
00:54:09
low-hanging fruit you can do this year um and if you have that then you might have this um exponential reduction if it's very easy to do very simple things in the first
00:54:23
years but the in most countries and most draw the road maps they are they'll look more like a linear facing out so I think from empirical reasons it's it's better to
00:54:35
talk about linear facing out and when you say five years five percent per year to most people that well in 20 years we will have account to zero because you think about a bank loan that you have to
00:54:48
pay a mortgage maybe five percent of that and after 20 years you paid everything but if you say five percent here with an exponential curve that takes
00:54:58
40 years so it's a bit aha so five percent does not have the effect that you think so I think both for for intuitive recent pedagogy reasons and for empirical reasons if you look at the ndcs they are
00:55:11
more or less linear and especially the emission training system in Europe but that's of course that's a construction when this is they are reducing 2.2 percent per year based on the first year
00:55:23
so you always have to say percentage based on the first year on the start year because otherwise you think ah based on the previous year so then it becomes exponential I discussed this a lot with many
00:55:36
researchers do during the summer and research the desk and we came to this conclusion there's no total the agreement but um but yeah so in science people still use
00:55:49
exponential growth quite often but I wouldn't try to talk about communication then the linear phase out is more common um just in in the curves that we that we developed previously what we also did we
00:56:04
had a we didn't assume immediately it starts coming down because that's not going to happen so we have a bit of a rollover so it has to now as soon as you have a rollover that's a degree of realism in that we let's assume we're going to do
00:56:16
something about it but it takes a little while to do it we've got political inertia technical inertia social inertia but as soon as you roll over you take out the bottom bit of the Curve so the bit that goes off like this now disappears because now because it takes you a bit more here you have to take
00:56:28
that bit of curve and shove it up here so in actual fact the practicality of the curves that we do is is not much different from yours except for you've got this rollover section so I think it adds a sort of a realistic element to it and I think the bottom end of the curve
00:56:41
anyway we don't really know what's going to happen there so one of the arguments the economists used is that you get um diminishing returns it gets harder and harder to get the last little bit out but there are other ways you could argue that you could say well why on Earth would you want to be getting fossil fuels out if you only get a little bit
00:56:53
because it costs you a lot of money it's fine build a big oil rig if you get loads and loads of oil if you only need a little bit at the end just shut it down because it's so expensive so I think there are arguments you could just cut off at the end so we don't know happens what happens exactly at the end
00:57:06
but we do know what happens at the beginning and it'll take a little bit of time and so therefore I think any practical interpretation of it gives something like this for 1.5 degrees Centigrade there's almost no flexibility a little bit of inertia then it's pretty
00:57:16
much a straight line down um I think in the time frame we have to deal with climate change or probably all other issues I don't think we're going to get a global sort of world government but I do think that we could and we should and I would
00:57:32
argue almost as far as we have to have some way of allocating out if we are serious about these uh these temperatures which are also do with impacts some way of allocating out the carbon budget and I think that that is something we
00:57:45
have to be more serious about is how we do that and that discussion has been fudged every single cop and the physics doesn't care here we have to get that sorted out so that is a global issue but that's not Global governance because then how we do
00:57:56
that in each country will vary how Sweden lives within its carbon budget is up to Sweden China will do it this way Japan will do it its way the UK will try its limitable style so every country will need to use its culture its geology
00:58:09
its resources its labor in the ways that most that best fit within that country and I think that is very much up to each country but how you divide the budget is something that has to be decided ultimately it's gonna have to be decided at some sort of global or at least very
00:58:23
significant numbers of the country the countries coming together to decide on that otherwise the temperature will just keep going up yeah brief I think we have good examples from them from the the
00:58:36
CFCs when there's a phased out after the Montreal protocol um I think the world was using World Trade Organization so they they most of the countries accepted the facing out or
00:58:47
the total abolishment of CFCs and the few countries that didn't were boycotted economically so so we do some kind of global governance in the trade system to to boycott those countries and to punish
00:59:01
them because there was a simple technical solution because there was a technical fix for that problem um I think otherwise as Kevin says I mean the Democratic accountability can
00:59:13
only be met at the national level because we don't have in the Democracy at the global level we're very difficult to imagine a global governance but we need to have similar things like in smoking when we understood in most of
00:59:25
the countries in the Western World at least I was assumed at that time 30 years ago during the neoliberal era I was so impressed by the government that just prohibited smoking in public areas
00:59:37
and they knew one thing passive smoking kills that was a scientific fact from the from the doctors from the medical doctors and that was sufficient to know down to understand the scientific fact that passive smoking kills and then just
00:59:50
prohibited this now we know that passive fossil fuel combustion kills very much people are people dying all all over the world especially in in very
01:00:02
warm countries where contradicted the least to global warming so when we know this I think we can we can ask more courage from from governments
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